We Put 18 New Pages on the Site in September. Five Weeks Later, Google Is Showing Them to Homeowners.

On September 9 and 10 I put 18 new pages on this site: seven city pages like Bradenton and North Port, eleven trade pages like plumbers and handymen, and a locations hub tying them together. I wrote about why a site needs that many pages the same week. This post is what happened next, with the real numbers, pulled from Search Console and Google Analytics on October 17.

The numbers are small. I am publishing them anyway, because the useful part is not the size of them. It is what they say about who Google is showing the pages to.

Where the site stood before

Baseline on September 8, the day before the pages went live: over the previous 90 days the site had 146 impressions in Google search and 2 clicks, at an average position of 27.5. An impression means someone saw, or could have seen, a link to the site in a results page. It does not mean they clicked.¹ Two clicks in three months is a site nobody is finding.

What Google did in the first five weeks

The latest complete 28-day window I can pull is September 18 to October 15. The prior 28 days are August 21 to September 17.

• Impressions: 294, up from 120. About two and a half times more.
• Clicks: 1, from 1. Flat.
• Average position: 34.1, worse than 28.7.

The position getting worse is normal when a batch of new pages starts showing up deep in the results. Before, a few old pages ranked for the business name and a couple of blog titles. Now the new pages are appearing on page four and five for a lot of searches, and they pull the average down. Google says it can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks just to crawl a page,² so five weeks is early.

Week by week, the count has climbed since the pages went live. The last full week, October 8 to 14, had 112 impressions. The week before the pages went live had 17.

By page: North Port 83 impressions, Lakewood Ranch 55, Bradenton 54, Sarasota 19, St. Petersburg 7. Average positions for the big four sit between 39 and 48, which is page four or five. The trade pages barely registered: electricians 3 impressions at position 7, roofing 4 at position 15, handyman and plumber 1 each.

The best page on the site is not one of the 18. It is a post from September 9 about Florida dropping local licenses for handymen and painters: 30 impressions at position 6, and the only page on the site that got a click in the window.

The finding that matters: who is seeing the pages

The impression count told me the pages were indexed. The query report told me something I did not want to hear.

Here are the real searches the North Port page appeared for in the window: "general contractors north port fl" (18 impressions), "general contractor north port fl" (17), "handyman north port fl" (11), "aluminum contractor north port fl" (7), "gate maintenance contract north port" (6). Bradenton: "general contractor bradenton" (10), "contractors in bradenton fl" (3), "building contractors bradenton fl" (2), plus the names of several local construction companies we have nothing to do with.

Every one of those is a homeowner looking to hire a contractor. Not one is a contractor looking for a website. The page is being shown, and it is being shown to the wrong person. A homeowner who lands on a page selling websites to plumbers closes it.

In the whole window there were exactly two impressions for something that looked like a buyer: "custom website lakewood ranch," at position 29. Of the 22 searches we actually want to rank for, things like "plumber website design" and "contractor websites sarasota," zero showed up.

Why it happened

I think the titles did it. The Bradenton page was titled "Manatee County Plumbers, Roofers, Pressure Washing." Read that with no context, the way a search engine does, and it is a directory of contractors in Manatee County. That is exactly the search it got matched to. Google lists the title element first among the sources it uses to build the title shown in a result, along with the headings and the page's own text,³ and the page's own text, by design, names every trade and every neighborhood in the county. The word missing from the title was "websites."

What we changed, and what we do not know yet

On October 1 I changed the Bradenton title to "Websites for Plumbers, Roofers, Pressure Washing" and left everything else on the page alone. One variable, so I can tell what moved. The plan was to read the result after three to four weeks.

As of October 15 the result is not in. Bradenton's queries from October 1 onward are still "general contractor bradenton" (5 impressions) and the same homeowner searches at roughly the same positions. Google has to recrawl and reprocess a page before a new title changes anything, and says that can take a few days to a few weeks,³ so two weeks is inside the window. I will report it either way.

What the analytics side says

For the full picture, here is Google Analytics for the last 28 days to October 17: 39 users, 53 sessions, 73 page views. The prior 28 days: 36 users, 44 sessions, 68 page views. Of the 53 sessions, 50 were Direct, which Google defines as someone arriving by a saved link or by typing the address,⁴ and that includes me checking my own pages. One session came from organic search. Zero phone clicks, zero form starts, zero leads in the window.

So: more impressions, the same one click, no leads. Five weeks of new pages has not produced a customer. I am saying that plainly because the alternative is the kind of post that says "traffic up 145 percent" and leaves out that it went from 120 impressions to 294, with one click.

What I would do differently

• Put the product word in every title from day one. "Websites for" in front, the city after. A title that reads like a directory gets directory searches.
• Read the query report in week two, not week five. The homeowner pattern was visible by late September.
• Change one thing at a time and date it. That part I did right. When the Bradenton result comes in, I will know what caused it.

What to check on your own site

This applies to a contractor more than it applies to me, because a contractor's pages are supposed to attract homeowners, and the same report tells you whether they are.

1. Open Search Console, go to Performance, and look at Queries. Then switch to Pages, pick your main service page, and look at the queries for that page alone.⁵
2. Read the queries like a customer. "Plumber near me" and "water heater replacement bradenton" are the right audience for a plumber. "Plumbing jobs" or "plumber salary" are not, and a page that pulls those is written like a job board.
3. Look at the page title in the browser tab. If it does not say what you do and where, in that order, fix it. Then change nothing else on that page for a month, so you can see what the title did.
4. Find the one page that does rank. For us it is a blog post nobody planned around. For you it might be a page you forgot about. Whatever it is, link it to the page that makes you money.
5. Write the numbers down with the date. Impressions, clicks, position. Small numbers are fine. Numbers with no date are useless.

If you would rather have someone read this report for you every week, that is part of what I do for every client, along with the site, the review requests and the missed-call text-back. $297 a month, no contract, and the site is built before you pay. The short version is on video here. And if your Search Console shows you ranking for the wrong thing, you are in good company. Mine does too.

1. 1. Google Search Console Help, What are impressions, position, and clicks? https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7042828
2. 2. Google Search Central, Ask Google to recrawl your URLs: crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/ask-google-to-recrawl
3. 3. Google Search Central, Influencing your title links in search results: the sources Google uses, and the recrawl lag before changes show. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/title-link
4. 4. Google Analytics Help, Default channel group: the definition of Direct. https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/9756891
5. 5. Google Search Console Help, Performance report (Search results): filtering queries by page. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/7576553